YMMV / Destiny

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• Annoying Video Game Helper: The Crucible announcer notifies you any time the lead team switches, so expect him to dramatically announce "GAINED THE LEAD" and "YOU'VE LOST THE LEAD" several times per match. Made more annoying by a slight delay in the announcements, so it's perfectly possible to hear YOU'VE LOST THE LEAD when in fact you've just pulled ahead in a close match.
• Anti-Climax Boss: There's a couple:
  • Sepiks Prime, end-boss of the Devils' Lair Strike, is a much easier fight than the Walker you take on immediately before it. It has less powerful weapons and a simpler attack pattern, spawns less numerous and dangerous mooks, and is fought in a much more accommodating boss arena.
  • A common complaint about the final mission: You go through three bosses who are all the same, and was already fought as a single boss, a whole planet-worth of missions earlier. See Disappointing Last Level below.
  • Skolas, Kell of Kells, the villain of the House of Wolves story. After fighting through hordes of mooks, when the player finally gets to the boss, he can be taken down by a single player with a decent rocket launcher, in about 8 seconds. Once you face him in the Prison of Elders, however, he's inexplicably many times tougher.
• Breather Boss: Urrox, Gulrot and Valus Trau'ug are usually regarded as the easiest Prison of Elder challenge bosses given the large amount of safe spots in their respective areas. Urrox in particular seems like a cakewalk following Round 4 which has you dismantle mines while avoiding Hive enemies buffed with Arc Burn (meaning Knights and Wizards can melt you with just two seconds of sustained fire).
• Broken Base: Nolan North replacing Peter Dinklage as the main Ghost. Many have warmly received North's performance, but many were also miffed over Dinklage being replaced as opposed to just having called him in for retakes.
• Cliché Storm: A common criticism among reviewers and players alike seems to be that Bungie is "playing it safe" with Destiny, creating a beautifully designed, solidly executed setting and story with very little distinctive identity of its own.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Year One had its fair share of bad player habits.
  • You want to find a group online for a Raid or Prison of Elders, but don't have the Gjallarhorn? Tough luck, unless the group happens to have enough Gjallarhorn holders already.
  • Looking for a Trials of Osiris fireteam to get through flawless? Expect people to outright kick you if you don't have the Thorn, the Sunsinger's Fireborn ability, any armour piece that can resurrect quickly, high Grimoire score ^note A relative indicator that you've been digging long enough in the game and high PvP kill ratio.
• Critic-Proof: The critical reviews for Destiny have been all over the map, often with critics rating it low despite asserting they enjoy it. It has not stopped it from being widely bought and still played by large numbers of people.
• Demonic Spiders: There's a few enemies in the game that provide ample justification for Guardians' Resurrective Immortality:
  • Vex Minotaurs are probably the most feared officer units in Destiny. Their Torch Hammers are extremely powerful, their Teleport Spam makes it harder to wear their regenerating shields down with concentrated fire and lets them enter melee range with terrifying speed, and once you have broken their shields, you'll be unpleasantly surprised to discover that they're one of the few enemies in the game without a weak spot to help you deplete their impressive health pools. The only thing you can do is shoot off their heads, which isn't helpful at all - it sends them into a berserker rage, increasing their movement speed and their Torch Hammers' rate of fire.
  • Cabal Colossi don't (thankfully) have regenerating shields, so any damage you inflict is permanent, and they're none too fast, but those are pretty much your only advantages. Their health-pools are huge, their weak spots are tiny (unlike that of the very similar Hive Ogre), and their weapons (a remarkably accurate and long-ranged gatling gun and a homing missile barrage) are devastating and almost inescapable regardless of whether you're in cover or not. Oh, and they have a Shockwave Stomp, giving them an "Instant Death" Radius just like that of a Strike boss, so melee attacks and close-range circle-strafing are right out.
  • Major and Ultra versions of the Goddamned Bats listed below automatically become these, since they now have enough health and damage output to become deadly rather than merely annoying.
  • Any shielded enemy at the Epic difficulty, which not only makes shields regenerate much faster, but reduces all damage that's not from the same element as the shield itself. This makes them exceptionally difficult to kill, and since Epic missions are almost guaranteed to have at least one Burn modifier, boosting a particular element's damage, they can obliterate you in seconds. To add insult to injury, Epic difficulty means that not only do the usual 'officer' enemies have shields (Fallen Captains, Hive Wizards, Vex Minotaurs, and Cabal Centurions), but so does an additional enemy type, turning Fallen Shanks, Vex Harpies, and Cabal Psions from mildly annoying Cannon Fodder into some of the most dangerous enemies you'll face and turning Hive Knights from somewhat challenging foes into near-unstoppable monsters.
  • Any melee attacker graduates from Goddamned Bats to this if Lightswitch and/or a Burn modifier of the same element as their melee weapon is in place. If you aren't the same level as them or your armor isn't high enough, their attacks can potentially turn into One Hit Kills.
  • Taken Fallen Captains. Not only do they have the same attacks as normal Fallen Captains (hard-hitting shrapnel guns or saber melee attacks), but they now teleport all across the battle area like all Taken enemies, as well as being able to take a bit more punishment than usual. They also like to spam a huge ball of darkness that, when it hits you, it blinds you before slowly regaining your eyesight, leaving you compromised while they rush in and melee you to death. Good luck facing three or four of them at a time, as is often the case with some Taken encounters.
• Difficulty Spike: Although Strikes are intentionally hard, the game's second Strike Mission, "The Summoning Pits", is significantly more difficult than most Year One strikes. Not only do you have to fight a Flunky Boss, but it includes a lot of Knights and a lot of Wizards. Doesn't help that the only cover you can use are for the boss itself, not all the mooks that spawn. Hope you can outrun more than just the boss's main attack.
  • It doesn't help that the boss of this particular strike is one of the few that can easily kill a player on his own if said player isn't careful
• Disappointing Last Level: The last story mission of the game takes place in the Black Garden, in the centre of it all with the Seed Of Darkness. The area leading up to it is awesome and cool, and the surprise when the statues come alive is epic too! Too bad that the bosses are copies of a boss you fought just a planet earlier.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite only being mentioned in grimoire cards Jaren Ward is an extremely popular character. Him being the creator of the Last Word helps a bit.
  • Cayde-6 is well-liked for being a badass Deadpan Snarker android merchant with the voice of fan-beloved actor Nathan Fillion.
  • Despite his Status as a Annoying Video Game Helper, Lord Shaxx is still quite liked for his Boisterous Bruiser personality.
  • The House of Wolves, escpecially their leader Skolas. See below as to why.
  • Eris Morn is considered one of the more interesting characters in the game. Her popular is such that her reappearance in the sequel was a major selling point for the Shadowkeep expansion.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Skolas' crazy ambitions in the House of Wolves have earned him a place in the hearts of many players who were looking for a villain that doesn't boil down to a generic boss fight.
  • Oryx drips pure malice, and steals the spotlight every time he makes his presence known. The narration drives it home by making up to be a threat far beyond anything in Destiny Year One and a return to Bungie's darker villains like Halo's Gravemind.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Ghost drone voiced by Peter Dinklage is fittingly called "Dinklagetron 3000", "Dinklebot", or simply "Peter". With his replacement by Nolan North, fans now refer to it as "Nolandroid".
  • Several of the factions have their own nicknames.
    • The Fallen - "Space Pirates".
    • Fallen Dregs are called "Gregs".
    • Vandals were called "Randalls", though it now seems to be reserved for the absurdly resilient Vandal who appears in the Forgotten Shore occasionally.
    • A slight misreading of the Fallen Shanks results in "Skanks".
    • Cabal - "War Rhinos". Also "Brutes" due to their Jumpjets.
    • The Hive - "Space Zombies".
    • The Vex - "Alien Terminators" due to their heads and their Terminator like movement.
  • Thalnok, Fanatic of Crota, is shortened to Mini Crota, due to him having similar fight mechanics.
  • Felwinter's Lie is called the Felwinter Sniper due to its abnormally long range for a shotgun and the ability to be reforged in order to obtain range-enhancing perks, all of which made it prominent during the days of the House of Wolves expansion and until the nerfs applied in The Taken King.
  • The Vex Mythoclast is alternatively called Vex Holocaust or Vex OP-clast due to its initially absurd killing power in the Crucible.
  • The 4th Horseman was formerly known as the 4th Horseshit after some nerfs and tinkering... now it's known as the 4th Holy Shit after a significant buff.
  • Lord Saladin of the Iron Banner is often called Lord Saladman of the Iron Banana due to the similarities in wording.
  • The Guardians' Super abilities have garnered nicknames of their own:
    • Fist of Panic/Titan Smash (Fist of Havoc) and Bubble (Ward of Dawn) for Titans.
    • Golden Penis (Golden Gun) and Space Saber (Arc Blade) for Hunters.
    • And lastly, Space Magic (Nova Bomb) and Emperor Palpatine (Stormtrance) for Warlocks
  • Early on, before he was nerfed, Valus Ta'aurc was affectionately known as "Rockets McDickface" because his tendency to relentlessly spam hundreds of missiles that could instantly kill even a Defender if half of them connected, while running back and forth across his arena so it was impossible to take cover from him.
  • While not intrinsic to Destiny, "god roll" is often used to descibe Legendary weapons that happen to come packed with a combination of favourable perks that makes them extremely sought after in gameplay.
  • The siege engine in the Wrath of the Machine raid has been nicknamed the "Death Zamboni" as its boss fight essentially has it slowly lawnmowing its way towards your fireteam; anything caught under the siege engine quickly dies electrocuted.
  • Enemies with gold health bars instead of red are sometimes considered "armored," even though Destiny has no "armor" mechanic apart from health or shields (the gold enemies are just tougher than usual). This is mostly a holdover from the Mass Effect games, where (starting with Mass Effect 2) armor does have its own, yellow health bar.
  • Due to its fantastic perks and overall performance, the Telesto often gets the additional moniker "the Besto". This persists even into Destiny 2 despite the nerfs to the Telesto's perks in that game.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Bungie's previous works like Halo and Marathon.
  • Firefly fans are included too, with fans producing a picture of transport Serenity in orbit◊ on a Destiny game screen. The fandom goes both ways: during the beta test, Bungie sent out this tweet showing Serenity landing in the Cosmodrome area; sadly, there is officially no possibility of having this ship in the actual game. There's also the presence of Firefly alums Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres as the voices of the Hunter and Warlock vanguards, Cayde-6 and Ikora Rey, which likely helps.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Before it was hotfixed by Bungie, the "Loot Cave" located in Old Russia. It would endlessly spawn hive acolytes and thralls, which could be killed instantly as long as at least two players are firing at the mouth of the cave. By doing this for as little as 15 minutes you could fill up your entire inventory with rare and legendary items. As of 9/25/14, all so called "loot caves" on all worlds have been nerfed, primarily by increasing spawn times from the 6-10 seconds they had been using, to 40 seconds as a standard. The caves can still be used of course, but you will have to wait almost a minute between waves.
  • There's a few ways to cheese bosses from being a major pain, some which include hiding spots, which would seem unreachable, but are reachable. Other hiding spots are obvious, but bosses can counter those with summoning enemies to rat you out.
  • The Vex Mythoclast. An Exotic that has a 3% chance of being rewarded from doing the Vault Of Glass on Hard-mode. Originally 56 shots in a mag, high charge rate and can mob the floor with particles of the enemy, faster than you can say its name. It was so powerful, a hotfix that nerfed it (and a bunch of other things) was specifically called the Mythoclast Fix. Post-nerf, another patch was scheduled, since it made the Vex Mythoclast underpowered, compared to the planned nerf, than it should be. This patch also fixed many other accidentally nerfed weapons.
  • The goddamned Gjallarhorn, that seems to elude many a player, and hits like a truck. Oh and Wolfpack Rounds shreds whatever wasn't killed by the rocket itself. And it homes in on its targets too. Bungie has since nerfed the Wolfpack Rounds for Year Two, and it did not get an updated version for Year Two, preventing it from gaining enough power to be useful in the higher level content introduced. Rise of Iron at least brought it back (with the one you get via the Exotic quest having a light level of 350) along with a new version by way of the Iron Gjallarhorn, though it retained the nerfed Wolfpack Rounds and found itself amidst a much larger pool of competitive Heavy Exotics like the Sleeper Simulant and the Dark Drinker.
  • Year One had the Black Hammer, which kept refunding ammo out of thin air so long as you keep chaining 3 precision hits in quick succession, making it the perfect sniper for knocking out slow bosses with large crit spots from afar. The fact that it was a legendary-class weapon also made it perfect to pair with other heavy hitters on this list, namely, you guessed it, Gjallarhorn. The lead-up to The Taken King predictably nerfed the White Nail perk to make it take from ammo reserves instead of being infinite, limiting its damage potential, and the Black Spindle obtained in the same DLC is esssentially a post-nerf Black Hammer that's not stunted in light level like the rest of the Year 1 weapons; still plenty powerful, but nowhere as broken as during The Dark Below and House of Wolves.
  • The Thorn, for many, has been considered to be one of the most annoying weapons to face in the Crucible, if just for how many people use it to get quick kills. Just two shots are enough to net you a kill given its Damage Over Time ability, without ever worrying from sticking your head out of cover. This has been exploited to hell and back in the competitive scene to ensure swift, flawless victories. Bungie applied a patch that, while it doesn't reduce the Thorn's overall power, makes it harder to abuse the DoT, along with a general nerf to Hand Cannons.
  • The Last Word, true to its lore reputation, has an absurdly fast time-to-kill window due to having the fastest firing rate of any Hand Cannon and having the Impact coming with the weapon class. Bungie nerfed its range and stability a bit in Year Two, though it is still a dangerous Exotic.
  • Sleeper Simulant, an exotic heavy fusion rifle introduced with The Taken King. Whilst it's not intended to be used in the Year One content, it makes a mockery of bosses like Atheon and Skolas - being able to wipe out both bosses within a minute. This is despite damage levels usually being capped when fighting lower level enemies, so that a player decked out in the most powerful gear can play with much lower level players in PVE without removing all challenge from the game, meaning that whilst it should be performing to a higher standard than the weaker Year One weapons, it should not be slaughtering high level enemies in such a small amount of time.
• Goddamned Bats: When one of the enemy races has a name that literally means 'The Annoying', you can expect a few of these, though they're far from exclusive to the Vex:
  • Vex Harpies are considered by many to be one of the most irritating enemies in the game. They're small and can fly, but they can absorb a high amount of damage before dying (particularly at higher difficulty levels, where they have powerful, rapidly-regenerating shields) and they can also do a lot of damage to you in a short amount of time. And they usually appear in packs of 2 or more.
  • Vex Hobgoblins aren't significantly tougher or faster than the Goblin Mooks they're based on, but are far more frustrating to fight. They have powerful, long-ranged, and very accurate sniper rifles, can drive you out of cover and back into their gunsights with grenades, and have a stasis mode that prevents you from killing them with sustained fire and restores health when it gets too low.
  • Cabal Phalanxes are only mooks (though tougher and harder-hitting than most, being Cabal), but their shields render them totally invulnerable from the front except for the tiny target of the arm they're shooting at you with^note which has a hint of Hitbox Dissonance as well, so good luck hitting it at longer distances, and give them a devastatingly powerful bash attack if you try to flank them by getting up close, which can end up in One Hit Kill, if you get sent flying by it. Better hope your grenade power is charged when you face these guys, because otherwise, you're in trouble. They're much easier to deal with in a fireteam, though.
  • Hive Thralls may be pathetically fragile individually, but they're fast, they hit remarkably hard if they get into melee range, and if there's one, there's inevitably a dozen of them charging towards you screeching their lungs out. They can be surprisingly smart, too, flanking and using ambushes to ensure that you don't have time to gun them all down before they get into face-slicing range. And that's not counting their much deadlier siblings, Cursed Thralls.
  • Fallen Stealth Vandals are, as the name suggests, Vandal Mooks with Invisibility Cloaks. Not a big deal, right? The problem is that their version of Visible Invisibility is a bit less... well... visible than most game examples, making it much easier for them to get the drop on you and much harder for you to off them quickly with headshots. Given that they're often equipped with powerful weapons like swords and sniper rifles, and that they rarely spawn alone, this can become a major problem.
• Goddamned Boss: A few:
  • The Templar from the Vault Of Glass was a great contender, due to its Oracle gimmick, which, at the time, was very hard, due to the lack of proper tactics for the Raid. If the Oracles weren't killed, you'd be stuck with a status effect that would kill you, unless you got cleansed. And the boss is a multi-stage fight, which ranges from protecting several conduits, to killing the previously mentioned Oracles, and the boss itself, which has a timer. It's to the point, that some say that the Templar is much harder than Atheon.
  • Atheon itself, as it was much like a less annoying version of the Templar, except that any slight mistake could cause a total party wipe. First, half of your team is teleported to a certain dimension, which requires one of two portals to be opened to let them out. Meanwhile, the teleported party has to recover a relic, kill Oracles before exiting, for a buff, exit, and hurt Atheon until the buff wears off. Rinse and repeat. And if you fail to complete any of these steps, until Atheon dies, it causes a total party wipe.
  • Crota, Son of Oryx, the Raid boss from "The Dark Below", has become this too, due to his many gimmicks. Here's the lot of them: Health regen is removed, unless you equip a Chalice, which only one can hold at a time, you have to recover a sword from a Swordbearer to hurt Crota at all, and to even be able to have the Sword carrier hurt Crota in the first place, is to wear him down with bullets and/or rockets. And ever once in a while, two Ultra Ogres spawn, which can wittle down your health fast. And to top it off, if someone dies, it feeds Crota's Oversoul, which will cause a total party wipe, if it's not extinguished before it explodes, which can become an instant party wipe, if you don't have enough players around. Compared to Atheon, he is much harder and considered the true final boss of the game, for now. He gets even worse on Hard Mode, where people have limited players to sky-high requirements, almost making it harder to get into a game on Hard, than actually fighting him.
  • Sekrion is often bashed upon due to its absurdly annoying Void splash damage, which is enough to throw off your aim and force you into hiding until it stops aggro-ing you. May the Traveler bless you when a Weekly Heroic / Nightfall adds Void Burn to the Strike.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The infamous "loot cave", a small cave that was an enemy spawn zone for them to move into the main area, but players found that if you stayed back far enough you could shoot them as they spawn and the timer had a new wave spawn almost instantly. This let you rack up dozens of engrams, even exotics, in minutes, with images of loot lining the floor of the cave. Bungie patched rather quickly much to the disappointment of fans, most of whom thought it was hilarious.
  • Sparrow Surfin', which allowed the player to dance while riding the Sparrow vehicle. Became an Ascended Meme when the editors acknowledged that it exists but decided not to fix it.
  • Any boss with a platform arena, stationary damage-over-time grenades, and good timing, can give players a brief and easy boss fight, by having them walk away from the grenade and fall off. This is possible with the 2nd boss at the Black Garden, with a well-timed Warlock Vortex Grenade.
  • The Gorgon segment of the Raid will curse all players to die and remain dead, until it resets to the last checkpoint. There's a small chance, that if a Sunsinger revives, that they will stay alive until they become cursed by Gorgons again, or die by other means. They can't enter the treasure rooms, though. On the other hand, it's possible to remove the Darkness Area of the Gorgon segment, by having a player remain behind in the Templar's arena, making the area much less a "Total party wipe with a checkpoint restart" to a "Let's try this again without a loading screen". Luckily there is a jumping-puzzle route to the treasure room that avoids the Gorgons entirely. This route is becoming more widely known.
  • Depending on if you were on the giving or receiving end, the Shoot to Loot perk in Crucible was this. A gun with the Shoot to Loot perk lets you pick up ammo or engrams by shooting them, making it a perk with... questionable usefulness. A bug allowed you to shoot an ammo brick as it was despawning, letting you pick it up twice. This led to abuse in the Crucible as people were able to pick up double the heavy weapon ammo than normal, creating unbalanced situations if a team didn't also exploit the trick. Bungie caught on, and the perk now has a brief cooldown period.
  • Ether chest farming. The House of Wolves expansion brought a new public event where, in certain areas, Guardians kill waves of Fallen, and when finished, a chest spawns in a number of set locations. It was found out that you can open the chest a second (and third, and fourth...) time if you leave the zone and then re-enter until the chest disappears. It can be possible, depending on where the chest spawns, to open the chest up to 8 times if you're fast on your Sparrow. Almost inevitably, this was nerfed so that each chest can be opened only once.
  • If you shoot a Vex hobgoblin with a sidearm, it will not trigger its stasis mode.
  • The Taken King gives us "Exotic Engram Farming." All you need is an Ice Breaker, Rocket Launcher and a bunch of Three of Coins from Xur^note (A consumable that increases your chances of getting an exotic engram while fighting an Ultra. If you don't get one, it stacks if you use another). To complete, run the "Scourge of Winter" mission, whittle down Draksis's health and then kill both you and him with the rocket launcher. Respawn and continue until a desired number of engrams is acquired.
  • The Sunbreaker's Hammer of Sol is normally limited to around 5-7 throws depending on whether or not you have a perk that increases the number of throws. However, by spamming the button that allows you to throw grenades, you can effectively cancel the hammer throw's animation, allowing for a staggeringly fast throw rate pushing into Game-Breaker territory ^* There exists a video where one Sunbreaker is able to deal most of the damage on the Undying Mind in one Super use, during a Nightfall Strike with Solar Burn. This one was so hilariously overpowered that patch 2.0.0.5 was placed in a hurry.
  • A Nightstalker's Shadowshot can, at max, shoot three arrows as longs as the Quiver perk is selected. One player found out that this combined with wearing the Graviton Forfeit helmet and opening the menu after firing off 1 or 2 shots, will refill your super, essentially giving you infinite shadowshots.
  • The new Sparrow racing, oddly enough, gives you credit towards the "Jolly Holliday" quest. For some, this is That One Sidequest; you need to get kills with The Last Word equipped, and similar to Thorn, death in the Crucible sets you back points. However, winning a Crucible match gives you 3% towards completion. Well, the SRL is considered a Crucible match, and completing a race counts as a win regardless of what position you finish in. So as long as you have the handcannon equipped, you're guaranteed 3% with little risk of dying. Slow, but effective. As a side bonus, you can complete the Crucible bounty "3 wins in one day" without ever firing your gun.
  • Players had previously found another bug with the Last Word: there was a small time frame when bringing up the sights where the damage bonus would apply while also gaining fine aim. This lead to absurdly short times to kill in the Crucible (as short as 10 frames!). Bungie addresses this in release of The Taken King.
• Growing the Beard: The Taken King expansion was highly praised for offering a more thorough story and gameplay experience than the previous year combined, and became the benchmark to gauge any Destiny expansions to come.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Petra Venj, from the House of Wolves story missions, makes several remarks about how glad she is to be back to field work and how pleased she is to work with your Guardian. This is put in a different light when you read her grimoire card and see what happened the last time she worked with Guardians. Petra called in a bombing mission on a Fallen position at the same time 3 teams of Guardians were assaulting the area, not only killing the Guardians but destroying their Ghosts, so they were permanently dead. This resulted in a long banishment from the Reef and was the reason Petra was Queen's Wrath representative in the Tower.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The flavor text for the Octopus Cloak is "If human extinction seems imminent, try to relax. You're just giving cephalopods a shot." Eight months later, human extinction and the ascendancy of squid- and octopus-based life would turn out to be the backstory for a different online multiplayer shooter series.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: When the game was originally released, there were only a handful of main and side missions on each planet, only a few strikes, and only a single raid that was enabled a few weeks after release. The main plotline could be completed in less than eight hours. Needless to say, fans weren't happy at the lack of content. However, as time passed, Bungie greatly expanded the game, adding multiple expansions, gameplay types like the Prison of Elders, and a new raid. The Taken King expansion completely reworked the game, adding several times as many story missions as well as new Crucible game types, three new sub-classes, another new raid, a completely new environment to play in, expanded leveling, and long-term endgame quests for new gear. These expansions have generally been extremely well-received.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Randal the Vandal, an unnamed, level 8 Vandal in the Forgotten Shore on the Cosmodrome; a glitch caused him to have defense and HP on par with an ultra you would find on a Nightfall mission. During the Wrath of the Machine raid in Rise of Iron, you can encounter Rahndel, the Perfected, an even more frighteningly powerful version of him.
  • You ever wonder why Oryx allows you to play Crucible matches on his ships? Because Lord Shaxx said so. ^Explanation A piece of Grimoire explains that Shaxx and his group of Redjacks were able to "tame" a Hive ship due to its biological components. Naturally, the fandom went bonkers with that fact and started making Chuck Norris-esque remarks about the Crucible handler.
• Memetic Loser: Crota. He's canonically one of the most feared enemies of Earth and a true Hero Killer, but players can find multiple ways to outright cheese him and his entire raid, leading to a viral spread of videos beating him with unusual stuff like... Necrochasm, No Land Beyond, etc. Better yet, different methods like beating him while blindfolded, while playing with drum controllers, using only voice command, and so on...
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "We have no idea what to do with our hands." Funnily enough, Bungie's joined in on mocking it.
  • The infamous "... That wizard came from the moon" line. To the point that Bungie made a T-shirt.
  • The dancing emote has become this, to the point that almost every lobby in The Tower had at least a group of players dancing. Heck, even Bungie acknowledge it:
  Bungie: Two minute warning. This will sting a little bit. We'll be clearing this Tower Dance Party like bouncers after a rough night.
  • The Loot Cave (see Good Bad Bugs above).
  • Punching is invariably brought up whenever someone mentions Titans.
  • Whenever anyone complains about anything in the forum, they are met with either "+10 Tears Collected" (due to a game bounty to collect alien "tears" on Mars), or else, "Shut up, Meg!"
  • The Cerberus Vae III mission briefing ^Explanation A copypasta of a Strike mission briefing in Destiny 1 that will get posted everywhere Destiny-related if there's an opportunity, usually with slight alteration.^{Full copypasta} "Whether we wanted it or not, we've stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars. So let's get to taking out their command, one by one. Valus Ta'aurc. From what I can gather, he commands the Siege Dancers from an Imperial Land Tank just outside of Rubicon. He's well protected, but with the right team, we can punch through those defenses, take this beast out, and break their grip on Freehold."
  • Imitating Variks' particular speech patterns, yes?
    • Variks' Large Ham announcer voice for the Prison of Elders bosses has also been getting a lot of traction in fan vids.
  SYLOK!! THE DEFILED!!! THIRSTS FOR YOUR LIGHT!!!!!!
  • Cayde-6 does not like rocks on his map. ^Explanation He asks Eris to get her rock off his map after she puts it there
    • It gets better. Now when you're walking around and stand on his map, he looks up and just stares at you. Cue guardians dancing in front of him on his map while Cayde-6 just glares a hole through them. Later grimoire entries mention Cayde complaining about Guardians standing or dancing on his table.
  • "I don't even have time to explain why I don't have to explain." ^Explanation The Exo Stranger's most memorable line in the base game, widely derided by the playerbase as a symbol of the game's troubled development in regards to its story.
  • "Fingertips on the surface of my miiiinnnnnnnddddddd!" ^Explanation One of Eris's first lines in The Taken King, and invariably the one most know her by due to how incredibly bizarre it is delivered. Not helped by Zavala's cautious answer.
  • 0.04% increase! ^Explanation The community's mocking response to Bungie correcting an announcement error concerning a buff to Auto Rifles in December 8's weapon patch and balancing, when the announcement was previously a 4% increase in damage across all archetypes. Naturally, this didn't take long to get ingrained whenever there's a funny bug or glitch being made public on social media like Twitter or Reddit.
  • The Hung Jury has an insane roll right now!^Explanation Someone posted on Reddit that Dead Orbit had an amazing roll on one of their vendor scout rifles, several months after it was available and knowledge of its existence and performance made rounds.
  • Omnigul's unofficial nickname is The Old Witch Of Cuba, if autocorrect has anything to say about it.
  • Gjallarhorn Day, where fans celebrate on the official reddit on the second weekend of August for Xur selling Gjallarhorn for the second time.
  • Rise of Tapir ^Explanation Rise of Iron's launch was marred with an unknown issue that spanned all platforms, preventing players from even logging into the servers. The animal name used for this error was "tapir"; shortly after, a stream of parodies flooded Bungie's Twitter account. It's not helped by Bungie implementing an emergency queue that constantly booted players to a rank further back.
  • Festival of the Cost ^Explanation The mocking name fans have given the second Festival of the Lost due to the low drop rate of the new collectibles which forces people to buy more Treasures from Eververse.
  • "I didn't even know someone with the Traveler's gift could die...until they did."^Explanation Lord Saladin says this line in Rise of Iron as he explains what happened to his comrades of old, but the delivery and Captain Obvious nature of it drops what might have been a dramatic line into Narm territory.
  • So we nerfed Fusion Rifles instead! ^Explanation The common assumption that for every weapon balance patch, there's always something that Bungie implements to impact the Fusion Rifle category of weapons in a negative way, with Fusion Rifles being the Butt-Monkey of the four Special Weapon types
  • Due to the competitive nature of the Looter Shooter market and Destiny's prominence in the genre against all criticisms, many gamers have taken to calling upcoming big releases that might significantly take away Destiny's playerbase as a "Destiny killer". ^* Recurring candidates are The Division (though this one was initially marred with many issues until the developers got a hold of things and revamped it to appreciable levels) and Anthem (2019), but nowadays the term is also derogatorily used to mock Destiny 2 as the game that ironically drove away much of its playerbase.
• Memetic Troll:
  • Master Rahool◊ being either a cheapskate, a con-man, or just colorblind, because he constantly hands out rares or uncommons when you bring him legendary engrams. Bungie released a fix they described as "Cayde-6 asked him to "decode" a bag of doorknobs."
  • Variks, no thanks to the Elder Cipher bounty which capitalizes on the quest's random drop from a hard boss, then a random drop from the challenge's end loot, and a random waiting time for the quest's final bounty.
  • The Taken Phalanx (an enemy with a knock-back attack that it LOVES to use) on "Cayde's Stash," positioned just inside the only door into the colony ship from a ledge overlooking a very long drop. It's like something right out of Dark Souls.
• Moral Event Horizon: Skolas firing on civilians during his uprising just because he wanted to "take the fight to the enemy". It's treated as a Moral Event Horizon in-universe too, as him doing so is what caused Variks to defect to the Reef.
• Narm:
  • Some of the stories that go along with the Class Item descriptions can sound silly to the right ears.
    "The child asked me if I was a clock. I said I was marking time until the world was safe for her."
  • The Exo Stranger's "I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain." gets chaff for representing everything wrong with the vanilla game's storytelling, and one of the first hints that the script has been drastically modified from its original plot.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: There's actually quite a substantial amount of lore regarding the history of the City, the three Factions, Awoken, weapons, etc. Chances are though that players will be primarily interested in grabbing loot as opposed to worldbuilding. This is largely due to an extensive degree of All There in the Manual. Everything is revealed by unlocking Grimoire entries, which you actually have to go to the Bungie website to read and can't be accessed in-game. There is almost no in-universe exposition beyond "You're a guardian now, this is the Tower, something terrible is happening to the Traveler, all our hopes are on you to help fix it." This even became a common criticism among players and reviewers.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: A retroactive example that crosses over with the events of Destiny 2; Shiro-4 has become quite a bit more popular since Cayde's death in Forsaken. Many people are hoping he'll return at one point to see how he reacts, and quite a few people are hoping that he'll become the next Hunter Vanguard.
• The Scrappy:
  • The player's Ghost is not very well liked, despite being voiced by fan favorite Peter Dinklage. Its voice acting is generally dull and uninteresting, and it constantly spouts unnecessary exposition. While in cutscenes he does much better, Dinklage's enthusiasm is absent in gameplay. After being completely absent from the The Dark Below^note Aside from the PlayStation exclusive "Undying Mind" strike and House of Wolves expansions; Dinklage was eventually replaced in the role with The Taken King expansion by Nolan North, with North even rerecording all of Ghost's existing dialogue to match. Word of God states that the recasting isn't down to complaints about Dinklage's performance, but rather down to his inavailability due to his busy schedule.
  • Master Rahool, due to the initial engram system where he could end up decrypting legendary engrams into rare ones, lowering the item's value. It's gotten to the point where enraged players called him color-blind. It's been mitigated a bit through the years when Bungie fixed the engrams to decode as the appropriate rarity, with a chance for a higher grade.
  • Shiro-4 isn't very appreciated in the Rise of Iron expansion, either. He's often considered to be a dumbed-down version of Cayde (which makes sense, considering his Foil status), and is often considered as just being there to replace Cayde. Also, he rubs off as a bit of a jerk in some of his lines.
  • Tess Everis is widely hated for being the face of the much despised microtransaction system that is the Eververse Company. Her fairly patronizing and condescending demeanor doesn't help, either.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Cryptarch is your main way to get loot, besides getting Engrams. The only problem is, when you're Level 20 or above, your need for Legendary Engram rockets, as you need a full set of Legendaries to reach level 28, or even do decently at tougher missions. Why is that a problem? The Cryptarch is practically a Random Number God Vendor, so most of your Legendary Engrams are at the mercy of that guy. Prior to being patched in the 1.0.2 update, you also had a much larger chance of getting Uncommon and Rare level gear.
  Cayde-6 took the Cryptarch aside and showed him a sack of doorknobs. He decoded that mystery pretty quickly.
  • During Year One, you were required to get Legendary gear to even progress to the end-game content due to the Light level mechanic. Following the launch of The Dark Below, you were also required to use a Commendation from the related factions for helmets and chestpieces, which is earned by ranking up a faction to 3 and beyond. This was abandonned with the launch of House of Wolves.
  • The entire loot system in general is pretty much universally reviled. Prior to the 1.0.2 patch, it was actually more cost effective to grind mobs by yourself rather than participating in the much longer, but more fun co-op missions. Another sore point of contention is the apparent trend of the worst performing players in Strikes and Crucible matches consistently getting Exotic drops while the top performing players are given absolutely nothing.
  • One big criticism is the game's heavy reliance on Horde Mode style events, where players have to hold a certain point against endless waves of enemies for a certain period of time, which can happen multiple times in a single level. It can quickly become repetitive and drag down the pacing of the game.
  • The Exotic Weapon Bounties, as well as being That One Sidequest, are as widely hated in the forums as the loot system itself, mainly because most demand either ridiculous or nigh-impossible achievements. Sometimes both. Thankfully, the Taken King seems to have removed a few of the old exotic bounties, leaving those weapons to be retrieved from engrams (Invective, for example), but it also introduced a couple of new ones. Thankfully, those are significantly more reasonable than stuff like Thorn's old "500 Void Kills in the Crucible", which consistently gave anyone who wasn't a Warlock a hard time.
  • Any fight where the boss drains your Super charge or disables another ability like double-jumping, making it significantly harder to take said boss down.
• Scrappy Weapon
  • Auto rifles as a class aren't hated, but between patch 1.1.1 and 2.0, the first two archetypes were poorly regarded by players, seeing them as useless in PvP (and PVE) for taking too long to kill. Case in point, the Unwilling Soul. Everyone hates it.
  • Not anymore, but it's important to note that earlier in the game, the playerbase of Destiny hated pulse rifles, to the point that when Bungie asked what the average Guardian's favorite pulse rifle was, the common response was to ask if it was a trick question, or just say they didn't use them. By now, they're decently well-liked, and even considered overpowered in some iterations.
  • The Necrochasm was one of the playerbase's most disliked weapons, simply because it's so weak compared to other Exotic primaries. The nerf to auto rifles about two months after Crota's Hard Mode was released didn't help matters. Note also that it's a high rate of fire low impact rifle, which is already a scrappy weapon by Destiny standards. The Taken King fixes this by increasing the magazine size to 54 rounds, greatly increasing the stability, and upgrading its perks: Cursebringer is now almost guaranteed to activate, and Rangefinger (increases range) is replaced with Zen Moment (hits increase stability by up to 50%).
• Shocking Moments: To say The Taken King comes with a bang would be a gross understatement. Oryx's invasion of the Solar system brings drastic changes to the world's balance, and terrifying enemies make their appearance. This goes even further as one reads into the Book of Sorrows, where the writers outdid themselves in weaving an epicly horrifying lore, to say the least.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus post-launch seems to be that the game is a good, beautiful shooter, but it lacks content, has lackluster loot mechanics, suffers from matchmaking only available for Strikes and Crucible, and that there is little to do apart from grinding between levels 20 and 25.
  • The Taken King seems to have been much better received, as was House of Wolves. In general, you can ask just about anybody about their experience with TTK compared to most of the Year One content and you'll get a response indicative of the game's improvement. The worst you'll typically get is a complaint about the removal of HoW's Ascension/Etheric Light system of upgrading weapons and armor and people wanting to hang on to old loot.
• Spiritual Licensee:
  • The game is cited as a worthy Spiritual Successor to Star Wars. Specifically, the game has a ton of story and tone similarities to Star Wars Legacy.
  • Alternately, it's an idealistic version of Warhammer 40,000.
  • Others have started to see it as a great adaptation of Guardians of the Galaxy, due to both franchises being Space Operas with a prominent group of protagonists called "Guardians", lots of bounty hunters, Badass Longcoats, evil glowing purple things and mood-breaking song and dance.
  • The setting and aesthetics are so similar to Phantasy Star Online and so numerous that it's staggering. Someone even made an image comparing the two.
  • It's basically a less cartoony, MMO Borderlands.
• That One Boss: They show up here and there, and the bug giving Strike bosses the same (high) damage and resistance modifiers as Raid bosses doesn't help:
  • Phogoth The Untamed. To elaborate, Phogoth is a Hive Ogre from the second Strike mission who can shoot Eye Beams at shocking speed and range. Even if you hide, you still have endless reinforcements of Hive to deal with. And don't get us started on the Thorn's side quest, requiring not only doing the strike with an Epic Modifier, but having to kill another boss before killing Phogoth.
  • Valus Ta'aurc, boss of the Cerberus Vae III strike, is Phogoth all over again, with all the same problems associated with his fight (enormous damage output, powerful/hard to kill mook summons, and a not-particularly-friendly boss arena) except that this time he's got a deadly indirect-fire Macross Missile Massacre to ferret you out if you try to hide from his monstrously powerful gun. Bungie acknowledged this by reducing the Ta'aurc's overall health.
  • The Templar: If you don't know that the Relic can cleanse, you'll be running around, focusing on the Oracles of a slightly Flunky Boss, which will prolong the battle, until the boss is enraged, and probably kill you all.
  • Atheon: This boss needs incredible coordination. You need to gather a relic, every "wave", have people open the portal from the Relic areas, kill Oracles to gain damage buffs against him, kill Supplicants to make sure they don't kamikaze you, and keep firing and dodging Atheon when the Relic carrier is through. Rinse and repeat. And you're on a time limit too, so if you can't kill him within 8 minutes, you, and all your friends, are most likely going to die.
  • Urzok the Hated, a super-size Hive Knight, target of one of Eris Morn's sidequests (although you can encounter him even if you didn't buy the DLC). He appears outside Skywatch during Warsat Public Events and wields a giant sword with which he smacks down one and all. Don't try jumping to evade him, either, because he will swat you right out of the air. He wouldn't be much trouble to take down individually, but he doesn't spawn until about midway through the event, when you're already hip deep in both Fallen and Hive mooks and leaders, and are being pounded from above by tomb ships, in one of the smallest public event areas on any map; so if you concentrate on him, one of the Hive Wizards or Fallen Captains will have a good chance to take you down. He is also very, very fast and very, very strong, and has almost as much health and shielding as a strike boss. So why Urzok the Hated? Oh, no reason.
  • Golgoroth: Imagine Phogoth with more than 20 times as much HP. Now imagine he can heal whenever a Cursed Thrall goes off too close to him. Now imagine that you can only die six times (as a fireteam) before he forces a wipe. The fight with Golgoroth really is a marathon from start to finish—it's not uncommon for people who had a lot of trouble with the Warpriest to get stuck at Golgoroth for days before they figure out how to get enough damage off to kill him before he enrages.
  • Kovik, Splicer Priest on his own is more of a Goddamned Boss than this trope. He has a massively damaging cannon that can melt health quickly, but it is easily avoided. He also has a melee attack that can instantly kill most Guardians, but none of this is too much. What really pushes him into this territory is the splicer ogre that is chained up in the middle of his boss arena, and that he sets free when he looses about a third of his health. The ogre has a ground pound attack that will instantly kill most Guardians, and after a while becomes enraged and will start running after Guardians rather than simply lumbering slowly around. The ogre also is totally invulnerable to everything and cannot be killed. It doesn't even have a health bar. Between Kovik, the adds and the Ogre, this is easily one of the most frustrating boss battles in the game, especially for uncoordinated teams. Te trick is to have one of the team members shoot the ogre to draw its aggro and kite it away while the other two focus on dealing damage to the boss.
• That One Side Quest:
  • All Exotic Weapon Bounties amount to this, requiring you to do a series of bounties, with each getting harder and harder, or tedious. One bounty may require you to get kills with Void-weapon damage, while others require thousands of glimmer to purchase 50 Special Ammo Synthesis. And unless you've researched the bounties online before accepting one, you won't know whether the weapon you get at the end will be worth all the effort, or if you would have been better off just buying one of your choice outright.
    • The Thorn Bounty requires you to beat the Summoning Pits, kill 500 Hive enemies, kill 100 players with Void weapons/abilities (which decrease upon death), and finally, complete a Nintendo Hard Strike Mission that is only available through the Bounty, and defeat a mini-boss that only spawns after you defeated a certain wave of enemies that accompany Phogoth. Without killing Phogoth.
  • Powering up your Exotic and Legendary items can turn into That One Side Quest over and over again, as you go loot farming for enough materials, although after an update, you can just buy missing resources. Not to mention that you need enormous amounts of Ascendant Shards and Ascendant Material for your Legendaries as well, which are only randomly found during public events, Strikes, and Crucible matches. In other words, it will take you a while.
  • Reforging Exotics from Xûr have become this too. Getting Strange Coins, Motes Of Light, or Exotic Shards, aren't a big problem, but getting back the large amount of Glimmer a reforging requires, is tough. Especially since they require, at minimum, 7000 Glimmer. At max, you can hold 25000 Glimmer.
  • Courtesy of Eris Morn, we now have the Urn of Sacrifice quest; actually a series of sidequests which start with acquiring the Urn from Xur (so you can only begin the quest chain on weekends). You must then kill 25 Thrall with a Solar Fusion rifle; next, melee kill 5 Cursed Thralls (and dying resets your progress to zero); use Void damage to kill acolytes and wizards (dying slows but does not reset you on this stage); then kill Urzok the Hated, That One Boss mentioned above. Finally, there is a Level 26 mission which only unlocks once you have gone this far, which leads you to the Moon to face a Hive horde and not one, but TWO Ogres. Finally, once the quest is finished, you must take the Urn back to Xur for safekeeping- so your reward from Eris can only be collected on a weekend, too.
  • Both the legendary sword quest and Touch of Malice quest require large amounts of Hadium Flakes. The only way to acquire said flakes is to open loot crates on the Dreadnaught. Hope you have a spare hour or two to farm them.
  • The Sleeper Simulant questline is a fairly lengthy process that requires completing an unique mission that's only unlocked after randomly getting 4 Fusion Rifle parts to bring back to Banshee-44; it demands that you memorize a certain enemy spawn pattern, then translate it into binary code to input in a terminal; after which you have to complete another mission under a time limit, then code some more binary; and then, you have to find various quest items scattered across different locales, three of them involving waiting for a Warsat public event, before culminating with a very hard version of the Fallen S.A.B.E.R. Strike.
  • If you thought Year 2's Sleeper Simulant quest chain was a complete doozy, wait until you try Rise of Iron's questline for the Exotic Pulse Rifle, Outbreak Prime, for it is basically both the Sleeper Simulant and Touch of Malice questlines rolled into one journey of pure brain wracking. Not only do you need to find 5 monitors scattered throughout the Wrath of the Machine raid and activate them in order (the fourth of which requires a full fireteam of 6 players), but you also need to be knowledgeable in mathematics in order to further the quest chain, along with completing the entire raid once more and doing a few patrols and strikes in between.
• The Un-Twist: Subverted with the Traveler; it really does love sentient life and just wants to help, but the Darkness is manipulating it to help specific races for its own purposes.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Sadly, the immortal "that Wizard came from the moon" line didn't make it to the final game. Weirdly, this creates a small Plot Hole; after this mission you unlock the Moon to battle the Hive, but without this line it's not clear why it would be your next stop. The Taken King reorganises the plot of the original Destiny storyline into several specific quests, with one change being that the player's introduction to the Speaker is moved from after the first post-tutorial mission to after the introduction of the Hive, and starts a second quest which takes the player to the Moon.
  • The Dark Below added a new currency in the form of Vanguard and Crucible Commendations that were now required in addition to the existing Vanguard and Crucible Marks in order to buy Faction weapons, along with Faction helmets and chest armor. These were obtained by increasing your rep with the respective factions, and could only be earned one at a time, putting a major bottleneck on what players could obtain. Thankfully, this was retired with the release of House of Wolves.
  • The voice of the Ghost, going from Peter Dinklage to Nolan North. Upon the initial change, which saw all of Dinklage's dialogue replaced by North's rerecording of the same lines, some people complained that North didn't provide the exact same performance as Dinklage, and that North's voice wasn't "manly" enough to voice the Ghost - others noted that North's performance was similar to C-3P0, Jarvis, and 343 Guilty Spark, and found it to be more fitting than Dinklage's performance. The complaints died down after the launch of The Taken King, when North was given new dialogue to work with instead of just rerecording Dinklage's lines.
• Tough Act to Follow: The series is Bungie's first project following (their) conclusion to Halo, and has since garnered mixed-to-positive reception given Destiny's turbulent development and game cycle. Despite being considered as polished at the end of its DLC cycle with Rise of Iron, the game still doesn't match up to the Halo's unanimous praise ^note At least the ones developed by Bungie, as 343 Industries' Halo games also suffer from Tough Act to Follow and Only the Creator Does It Right.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • The Taken King and patch 2.0 have been very well received, and many people have stated that they find the game fun again, if not for the first time.
  • While Rise of Iron started showing signs of fatigue (due to being essentially a Filler for Destiny 2's delayed launch), the Age of Triumph free update rallied many players back to the game in order to re-experience the raids, just in time to anticipate for Destiny 2, which would launch less than half a year after the update.

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